Error Analysis Of Students' English Writing In Vocational College

English writing has always been a difficult point in English language teaching, especially for students in vocational college whose English proficiency is comparatively weak. English writing has become a headache for them. Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis are used in this thesis to analyze errors in students'compositions, to classify them and find out the possible causes of these errors.Most of the researches on errors are about middle schools, colleges. But in this study, a five-year-system vocational college is studied, which is rare. It is hoped that this study may arose people's attention to English writing in such type of college. The samples in this thesis are collected from students'compositions of final examination in an advanced teachers'college. The subjects are chosen from the English major students in the fourth grade. The aim of the research is to collect errors in students'writing, classify them and find out the possible causes. From the analysis, it can be seen that the most frequent errors are grammar errors, while vocabulary errors rank the second. This indicates that students'English level is still far from satisfactory. Different from other types of college, where students all come from senior high schools, students in Yunhe Advanced Teachers'College are enrolled from junior high school after high school entrance examination. They haven't experienced the college entrance examination. Therefore, they lack the systematic and intensive training of certain grammatical items. Vocabulary errors mainly consist of collocation errors, word order and misuse of errors, which has close relationship with memorizing habits. In order to make it clear for the classifications and causes of errors, the author conducts a questionnaire and an interview to understand them better.The findings indicate that there are two major sources of errors: interlingual transfer and intralingual transfer, between which interlingual transfer is more obvious than intralingual transfer. Besides, through the questionnaire and interview, it is found that lack of practice is another important reason for producing errors. From the survey, over 60 percent students write a composition half a month or more than a month. Moreover, insufficient language input results in short of vocabulary. Consequently, students are likely to make errors during the process of writing.Based on the problems above, the author put forward five suggestions on English writing teaching. First, arousing students'interest in writing; second, ensuring the grammar learning to enhance the basis; third, accumulating vocabulary and knowledge out of class through extensive reading; fourth, increasing target language output through more practice; finally, awake students'awareness of the difference between English and Chinese by contrasting the two languages in teaching.